The Four-Day School Week

School Administrator, March, 1999 by Kimberly Reeves

"We invited them to the table, but the only thing they brought was their own personal intuition," says Cleaver, noting his district's buses must travel 900 miles on any given school day. "We invited them to prove us wrong, but they really didn't provide us with anything other than rhetoric and opinion. They didn't want information."

If the schedule didn't work, the school district would restore the fifth day, Cleaver promised the community. "There's nothing magical about the five-day week," he told them. And he pointed out that spending only 2.5 hours in class on Friday mornings made no sense, especially for younger children who had to spend two hours on a bus every day. Ultimately, his proposal won out. "I believe you do long studies and you collect data and you look to re-evaluate and assess your situation down the road," Cleaver says. "This schedule is an ongoing process. The opponents said that once we started, we'd never turn back. ... We will turn back if people show us that this is hurting kids."

R.L. Richards, superintendent in Texico, N.M., has studied the four-day week in New Mexico school districts. The biggest challenge, he says he found, was in teacher preparation. Just as in block scheduling, teachers must be prepared to deliver a good lesson and a half during the extended time.

"You can't take roll, talk about your family for a while and then introduce a lesson and wing it," Richards says. "You have to be prepared to teach."

Coker, the superintendent in Animas, N.M., agrees the four-day week cannot stand alone. To implement the schedule effectively a school district must make some accommodations. In Animas, a school breakfast program was added for the first time. Frequent rest periods were provided for younger students. More rigorous classes were shifted to the morning and activities to the afternoon.

The district also strengthened school attendance policies to cut down on student and teacher absences, Coker says. Staff sick leave was reduced by two days to reflect the shorter school year. In other districts that have adopted shorter weeks, older children have been trained by home economics teachers to serve as babysitters.

"We made a concerted effort to change a lot of issues in the year that we implemented the four-day week," Coker says. "You have to make changes."

New Rationale

Two of the most recent school districts to move to a four-day school week--Saratoga, Ark., and Beauregard Parish, La.--added a new twist. These rural school districts moved to the alternative schedule not to save money but because of perceived academic and social benefits.

What limited research has been done on student achievement under the four-day school week has found little or no impact. An early study in Colorado showed "student achievement didn't suffer under the four-day week, but it didn't increase either," says Newlin of the National Rural Education Association at Colorado State University.

Richards, the Texico, N.M., superintendent, found similar results in his own early examination of testing data from the first 10 New Mexico districts on a four-day week. He compared eight years of test scores from four-day and five-day districts in 1990 and found the mean score for student achievement among four-day schools was higher but not high enough to be considered statistically significant.